Rape
Work in progress , about to rape and kill Elia Martell.]] Rape is considered a major crime in Westeros, which faces severe punishment under the law. Men found guilty of rape can be punished by amputation, most often castration, though they are given the choice to avoid this punishment by joining the Night's Watch for a life of exile at the Wall. Most choose castration rather than a grim, freezing, and short life at the Wall. In practice, powerful noblemen are often able to get away with raping commoner women they rule over if they can keep it a secret. During wartime, soldiers often rape the women living on their enemies' lands, sometimes as part of broader, calculated terror-tactic of burning out their homes, destroying their crops, torturing their children, and other atrocities. "Rapist" is not a word in the storyverse of Westeros, either in the novels or TV series. The term consistently used for anyone who has committed rape is "raper", plural "rapers", not "rapist" (though a handful of times actors have misspoken and said "rapist", these are not canonical). Like the Heraldry page, this article is written from an out-of-universe perspective, first providing context for what the topic was like in the real-life Middle Ages, then how the A Song of Ice and Fire novels handle it, and then explaining how the Game of Thrones TV series adaptation handles it. Rape in the real-life Middle Ages In the real-life Middle Ages, rape was considered a horrific crime, though generally defined as when one man raped a woman who "belonged" to another man - "the husband, and no one else, had legal rights to sex with the wife".Karras 86 More generally, rape of a young daughter still living in the household of her father and under his authority was considered an offense against the father (as pater familias and head of the household). The raped woman's consent was not emphasized. There does not appear to have been much focus on or awareness of rape of males.Karras 113 There was a very drastic double standard of male privilege in the Middle Ages, and when it came to sex outside of marriage for men, i.e. with prostitutes, a general "boys will be boys" attitude predominated, while women who had sex outside of marriage were heavily shamed and punished: :"Providing an outlet for these men's desires that did not threaten the wives and daughters of respectable men was one of the reasons given for the establishment of municipal brothels. This reasoning privileged the male sex drive as something unstoppable, that could only be channeled into more or less socially acceptable outlets."Karras 121-123 Rape was considered one of the most severe crimes, though punishment varied by context. Rape of a child (i.e. a girl below marriageable age) was severely punished. Rape of a married woman was often punished by amputating a hand or foot. Rape of a single woman of marriageable age, however, was often prosecuted quite lightly - and if the woman was a commoner and she was raped by a nobleman, it was hardly ever punished. In cases of slavery, rape in the legal sense did not exist, as a slave-owner had sexual access to his slaves as property.Karras 126-128 :"...as with slaves in the antebellum southern US, the decision to agree to become one's master's mistress might be based on both physical coercion and economic necessity...an element of choice might be involved, and yet coercion remained the basic condition."Karras 114 Court case records about rape focused on physical violence against women, i.e. being beaten into submission while trying to fight off her attacker. The records never include questions about her consent - "to focus only on the evidence of violence and not on consent could mean that if the means of coercion were merely a threat rather than actual physical force, the crime could not be prosecuted."Karras 114 :"There are no statistics as to the prevalence of rape in medieval society. We have some court cases, but we can assume that the crime went unreported even more often than it does today, so the number of cases is not a good indication of the incidence of the offense. And there were many more instances that were not merely unreported but also unperceived as rape, because the coercion was other than physical."Karras 114 "Marital rape", as a term or even as a concept, simply did not exist in the Middle Ages. Between husband and wife, "in many kinds of sources, they drew very little distinction between rape and heterosexual intercourse generally. The woman's consent really did not matter."Karras 113 This is not to say that husbands didn't force their wives to have sex with them, physically or through emotional/economic coercion, but husbands had the legal right to sexual access to their wives' bodies, and married women knew this. Women did not tend to choose their husbands, their parents did, often to secure political alliances through their marriage. Other than overt, physically violent coercion, they didn’t have a legal concept of emotional/economic coercion, threats, etc. If a woman was put into an arranged marriage by her parents, and her husband subsequently forced her to have sex without her consent, under the current legal definition "rape" had not occurred. A woman in this society would not conceptually know that the term "rape" could be applied against her husband. Most would know that they simply had no other viable option but to submit to their husbands' sexual access and coercion - if she tried to fight him off, he had the right to beat her; she couldn't complain to her own father, because he arranged the marriage for political/economic reasons and typically would want to keep this arrangement (though if a husband was violently physically abusive to a very extreme level, the wife's parents might be concerned and seek redress). :"The lack of attention paid to whether or not the woman consents is perhaps not surprising given the role of consent (or lack thereof) in other aspects of life. Although according to cannon ecclesiastical law a woman had to consent to her own marriage, in practice the choice was often made by her parents."Karras 114 Attitudes about conception by rape in the Middle Ages were affected by limited understanding of reproductive biology, and absence of knowledge about genetics. The most common understanding of conception in the Middle Ages was the "one seed" theory: semen was thought to be the exclusive genetic material, and it simply incubated inside of a woman's womb to gestate into a fetus, sort of like putting dough into an oven to make bread. They had no knowledge of female gametes (egg cells/oocytes). The fact that children could physically resemble their mother or their mother's parents was explained away with the argument that the shape and size of an oven can shape the bread in its own image (i.e. Lamarckian characteristics). Some medical writers in the Middle Ages, however (who as theologians were celibate priests), developed the "two seeds" theory, which postulated that women as well as men produced some sort of seed/gametes that contributed to conception: :"The 'two-seed' theory of sex and reproduction held that both a male and female seed were necessary for conception. Conception, then, could not take place unless both the man and the woman ejaculated, thus requiring them both to feel pleasure...this had a negative effect in terms of rape law. Any woman who conceived was deemed to have consented to intercourse, since she must have received pleasure from it."Karras 51 :"This idea that women cannot conceive without orgasm and therefore that any woman who conceives has not really been reaped surfaced in the 1980's in abortion debates in at least two US state legislatures, as legislators argued that no rape exception to a ban on abortion was necessary. Stephen Freind, of Delaware County, Pennslyvania, claimed in 1988 that women could not become pregnant as a result of rape, because when raped a woman has "a certain secretion" that prevents conception. Henry Aldridge, of Pitt County, North Carolina, claimed in 1985 that women could not become pregnant if truly raped because "the juices don't flow". The voters could be proud that their legislators were on the cutting edge of fourteenth century science."Karras 184 note 34 More recently, while running for re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012, six-term Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri caused a controversy when during a televised interview he was asked about his opposition to abortion, and if he was at least in favor of exceptions allowing rape in instances of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother was at risk (exceptions which the 2012 Republican presidential ticket itself did not oppose). Akin responded, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." His remarks were heavily criticized as medically false and Akin subsequently lost the election, though later in his 2014 novel, Akin stated that he was unapologetic about his remarks and still believes them to be true. In truth, while the idea that a woman was not raped if she becomes pregnant (because consent and pleasure are somehow required for conception) has been around since the Middle Ages, even then it was not broadly accepted. Quite a lot of discourse was produced in the Middle Ages on the subject of nocturnal emissions by men - clergymen who had taken vows of celibacy, who thought that any sexual activity was a grave sin and would leave them hellbound, were deeply upset by these involuntary reactions by their unconscious bodies. Thus there was a large amount of medical discourse circulating at the time concluding that the functions of the body were automatic, and the consent of the mind was not necessary for a man to because sexually aroused and ejaculate during unconscious sleep. Seeing a parallel between the two, many medieval medical writers concluded that similarly, the female body is capable of conception even when a woman did not mentally consent to sex and was blatantly raped: :"Some medical writers, however, argued that a woman could emit seed without consenting to it. The rational will need not play a role; the pleasure is located purely in the body, not the mind. Nocturnal emissions provide a parallel."Karras 51 Therefore the view that a woman could not have been raped if she conceived, because pleasure and consent were necessary for conception, even in the Middle Ages was considered quackery found only at the fringes of medical writing. There is a persistent myth that a right called "First Night" (also called Prima Noctis or droit du seigneur) existed in the Middle Ages: the right of a nobleman to have sexual relations with a commoner woman on her wedding night. In truth, there is not a shred of evidence that "First Night" or anything like it ever really existed. The doubly fictitious Vulcan death grip is more real than First Night ever was. It is purely a stereotype about the Middle Ages that developed in the modern era without any basis in reality. By the late 20th century, the idea that "First Night" ever existed had been debunked for over a century. The popular Oscar-winning 1995 film Braveheart, however, prominently presented First Night as a practice which actually existed. Even when Braveheart came out in theaters, it was met by outright howls of protest from major academic historians for presenting First Night as real, but nonetheless the film singlehandedly impressed into the public consciousness as a whole the view that First Night was ever a real phenomenon. :"A persistent myth holds that medieval custom allowed a lord to deflower his serf women on their wedding nights. This myth still appears, for example in the 1995 film Braveheart, even though historians have demonstrated repeatedly, for more than a century, that such a custom did not exist...each of the medieval texts that have occasionally been interpreted as referring to such a custom has either been misinterpreted or was a fantastic explanation even in medieval times...No doubt many peasant women were raped or coerced by their lords, and there was not a great deal that they or the men in their families could do about it. But this offense was not institutionalized. It was never an official or customary right of the lord."Karras 86 George R.R. Martin started writing the A Song of Ice and Fire novels in 1991, and the first novel A Game of Thrones was published in 1996 - during this interval, Braveheart was released in 1995, and appears to have influenced Martin's writing. "First Night" does exist in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels in Westeros - or rather, it did exist. According to the novels, First Night was practiced in Westeros for centuries, but it was banned throughout the Seven Kingdoms by King Jaehaerys I Targaryen, over two hundred years before the main narrative of the novels takes place (the Targaryens were not purely vicious conquerors: they put an end to internal warfare, built a continent-wide system of unified laws, built roads like the Kingsroad to boost economic prosperity, and banned abuses of the commoners by nobles like First Night). In the fifth novel, A Dance With Dragons, Roose Bolton explains to Reek that some lords whose Houses are located on the fringes of Westeros still practice First Night when they think they can get away with it, though it is officially illegal and considered heinous. Roose relates to Reek that his bastard son Ramsay is the product of a rape he committed: knowing that the Boltons try to exact First Night when they can, a miller living on his lands married in secret, but Roose stumbled upon them while out hunting. He had the miller hanged and raped the miller's wife under the same tree that his body swung from. A year later she showed up at the Dreadfort and presented him with the infant Ramsay. Roose senses that Reek might be inwardly surprised, but he then scoffs that the Boltons aren't the only lords who still enforce First Night if they can keep it a secret, saying that the northern mountain clans (poor small Houses loyal to the Starks who live in the mountains of the northwest) as well as the alleged cannibals on Skagos island keep first night. Roose also accuses that members of House Umber have also exacted First Night from their commoners, though he says the Umbers adamantly deny it (and the veracity of Roose's claims cannot be confirmed). Rape in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels Much of what author George R.R. Martin wrote in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels was a reaction to previous High Fantasy literature, which typically had simplistic black and white morality, and did not particularly focus on the realistic brutality of medieval warfare, i.e. while Martin is an outspoken fan of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the morality of it can at times be simplistic. Martin criticized that all of the opponents are demonic forces of "Evil", no one minds when Orcs get massacred, but real life wars are fought between morally grey human beings, over resources, etc., or because their leaders got into a disagreement. There wasn't one "good" and one "bad" side in the Hundred Years' War. Similarly, while many people die in The Lord of the Rings in a massive war, nobody is ever mentioned as being raped during it. In contrast, as medieval armies advanced through enemy territory they frequently raped local women, along with pillaging their lands in general. Martin was also famously a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War draft, and strongly opposed mythologized glorifications of warfare. Therefore, the A Song of Ice and Fire narrative devotes a substantial amount of time to showing the suffering of the smallfolk (commoners) in wartime: poorly armed peasant conscripts get slaughtered by knights on the battlefield, dead refugee children are shown in the streets of the capital city who starved to death because of wartime shortages, and opposing armies often rape women in the other side's lands, as a terror tactic (along with burning out their homes and torturing their children to death). Martin's reaction was to show a darker, more realistic portrayal of the horrors of war. Of course, the world Westeros is set in is entirely fictional (not Earth in the distant past or future, just an alternate world), so it does not necessarily "need" to depict warfare as it was in real Medieval Europe to fulfill some standard of "accuracy". Yet by the same logic, given that the world of Westeros is a fantasy construct and not meant to be real Earth at a different point in time, it doesn't even "need" to be inhabited by humans: the entire planet could have been inhabited by Wookiees. Martin, however, was writing a realistic reaction to what he felt was sanitized High Fantasy literature which does not depict wartime violence realistically, and glamorizes it - and much of this previous High Fantasy literature was obviously pseudo-based on or at least inspired by Medieval Europe. Because Martin was specifically deconstructing and reacting to literature which was loosely inspired by Medieval Europe, he gave his storyverse a similar setting. Martin populated his world with humans - indeed, almost entirely humans, as non-human races are very rare and at the margins of the story, in contrast with other fantasy literature filled with Elves and Dwarves - because he used fiction as a mirror for social criticism. Martin has said that one of his major literary influences is William Faulkner, and Faulkner did not write positive stories depicting people as they should be, but tragic "southern gothic" stories (some of which included rape) containing flawed and at times detestable characters, as a social criticism or critique on the human condition. When asked about sexual violence in his novels, after Season 5 aired, Martin himself responded in an interview at length: :"The books reflect a patriarchal society based on the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were not a time of sexual egalitarianism. It was very classist, dividing people into three classes. And they had strong ideas about the roles of women. One of the charges against Joan of Arc that got her burned at the stake was that she wore men’s clothing—that was not a small thing. There were, of course, some strong and competent women. It still doesn’t change the nature of the society. And if you look at the books, my heroes and viewpoint characters are all misfits. They’re outliers. They don’t fit the roles society has for them. They’re 'cripples, bastards, and broken things' — a dwarf, a fat guy who can't fight, a bastard, and women who don't fit comfortably into the roles society has for them (though there are also those who do — like Sansa and Catelyn). :Now there are people who will say to that, 'Well, he’s not writing history, he's writing fantasy — he put in dragons, he should have made an egalitarian society.' Just because you put in dragons doesn't mean you can put in anything you want. If pigs could fly, then that’s your book. But that doesn’t mean you also want people walking on their hands instead of their feet. If you’re going to do fantasy element, it's best to only do one of them, or a few. I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like, and I was also reacting to a lot of fantasy fiction. Most stories depict what I call the 'Disneyland Middle Ages'—there are princes and princesses and knights in shining armor, but they didn’t want to show what those societies meant and how they functioned. :I have millions of women readers who love the books, who come up to me and tell me they love the female characters. Some love Arya, some love Dany, some love Sansa, some love Brienne, some love Cersei—there’s thousands of women who love Cersei despite her obvious flaws. It’s a complicated argument. To be non-sexist, does that mean you need to portray an egalitarian society? That’s not in our history; it’s something for science fiction. And 21st century America isn’t egalitarian, either. There are still barriers against women. It's better than what it was. It’s not Mad Men any more, which was in my lifetime." :And then there's the whole issue of sexual violence, which I've been criticized for as well. I’m writing about war, which what almost all epic fantasy is about. But if you’re going to write about war, and you just want to include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that and you don’t portray violence, then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that. Rape, unfortunately, is still a part of war today. It's not a strong testament to the human race, but I don’t think we should pretend it doesn't exist. I want to portray struggle. Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, then you probably wrote a pretty boring book."[http://www.ew.com/article/2015/06/03/george-rr-martin-thrones-violence-women George R.R. Martin explains why there's violence against women on Game of Thrones] Rape in the Game of Thrones TV series While rape does occur in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, the Game of Thrones TV adaptation by HBO has been at times been criticized for its portrayal. Executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have defended that scenes were in some cases from the source material itself and they felt it would detract from the integrity of the drama to shy away from it - i.e. Daenerys's wedding night with Drogo in the first episode. This explanation does not account for all changes, however: many critics familiar with the novels have complained that they are outright inventing rape scenes which did not exist at all in the source material, for shock value. The general counterargument from the scriptwriters has been that they want to stay true to the situation in the narrative, due to scenes being condensed and moved around, even if it wasn't word-for-word described in the text. Another counterpoint has been that rape scenes, even those directly adapted from the novels, can be more shocking or disturbing in television because it is a visual medium, compared to the novels simply mentioning that a rape occurred without going into too much visual detail. The following is therefore a comparison of rape or sexual violence scenes in the Game of Thrones TV series, and their equivalents in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels: General *Daenerys Targaryen's wedding night with Khal Drogo - This happened in the novels, essentially in the same manner. Viserys gave away his sister Daenerys to Khal Drogo to secure a marriage-alliance, basically selling her to get an army. The TV producers stated that they did not want to shy away from it. Indeed, in the novel version, the impressionable young Daenerys gradually starts saying "Yes!" as the night goes on, but in the TV series's version it is presented as much more tragic, and in the Blu-ray commentary Benioff and Weiss openly describe it as "rape". *Later in Season 1, Drogo's Dothraki warriors ride south and carry out a warm-up raid against the Lhazareen, simple shepherd-folk, to take plunder and slaves they will sell to pay for passage to Westeros on ships. Numerous Dothraki warriors are seen (in the background and briefly) who have been gang-raping captive Lhazareen women, and the rest are being gathered up and corralled off so they can be taken as sex-slaves by other warriors. This raping and pillaging is a specific plot point - Daenerys gets so upset about it that she complains to Drogo, who chides that war is always like this, but then grants her request to give all of the captive women to her custody so they won't be raped further. This entire sequence essentially occurred the same way in the novels. *While seated on the Iron Throne, Hand of the King Eddard Stark is disgusted to receive the rattled report of a refugee from the Riverlands (Joss), who mentions in dialogue (but no visual depiction is given) that Ser Gregor Clegane and Lannister soldiers have been raiding in the Riverlands, and as a terror tactic, burned their homes, covered children in pitch and set them on fire, and gang-raped their women, after which they cut the women to pieces. Horrified, Stark declares Clegane an outlaw, and sends out a company of men led by Beric Dondarrion to arrest him and bring him to justice. He also demands that Clegane's overlord Tywin Lannister come to King's Landing to answer for Clegane's crimes. Stark doesn't realize that this is exactly what the Lannisters had planned: knowing that Stark is an honorable man disgusted by violence against the unarmed and innocent, they sent Clegane to raid the countryside, to force Stark's hand and provoke him into challenging Tywin, providing the Lannisters with a pretext for war. This sequence plays out similarly in the novels - Clegane and his men are often described as using rape as a terror tactic against villagers, along with burning their homes and fields and torturing captives, though it mostly occurs "off-screen" in the novels, as it does in this episode. *Joffrey Baratheon is a tyrannical sociopath, but a surprisingly asexual character. He enjoys torturing helpless prisoners, but he doesn't get sexually excited by this - it is the glee of a wanton boy pulling the wings off of a fly. He repeatedly vents his frustrations by having his Kingsguard publicly beat Sansa Stark even even begins to have her stripped as well before Tyrion makes them stop. This happened in the novels, and indeed, had to be toned down somewhat (in the TV show they only begin to strip her, in the novels they rip off her top leaving her covering her breasts with her hands, as multiple Kingsguard members take turns beating her with the flat side of their swords against her bare skin for a protracted period of time). **An invented scene in Season 2 involved Joffrey ordering the prostitute Ros to bludgeon the prostitute Daisy with a staff. This was inspired by something in the novels: Tyrion ponders if sending Joffrey some prostitutes would help him vent his pent up frustrations away from the valuable hostage Sansa, or that as he is nearing the age of manhood, he might even be grateful for it - but this is never mentioned again. The TV producers stated that they read that line and thought it would be interesting to see how darkly that would really play out. Either way, this isn't really a "rape" scene as much as a torture scene, as the writers state that, again, Joffrey isn't tormenting these prostitutes for sexual pleasure - he's annoyed that Tyrion was trying to flatter him, and as a deliberately calculated move he's having one beat up the other to then present to Tyrion, to show that he rejects his attempt at humoring him. This scene may have been included to try to make up for the omission of the more graphic parts of Sansa's torment (the actress was underaged and they legally could not have her stripped to the extent she was in the novel) - though having him torment some prostitutes in private somewhat misses the same point that Sansa's torment does - Joffrey has utterly no shame and will publicly commit various atrocities, with no thought to how this affects his reputation. **Later in Season 3, Joffrey gets a bit drunk at the forced wedding of Sansa to Tyrion, and walks up to her and directly boasts that after Tyrion is done he may want to rape her, and he'll have the Kingsguard hold her down (though he doesn't specifically use the word "rape" his meaning is obvious). Again, Joffrey doesn't threaten this out of sexual desire - he's threatening it because as an utter sadist, he knows it will terrify Sansa. This exchange didn't happen in the novels, though it is not that out of keeping with Joffrey's character (publicly making absurdly sadistic threats, ignorant that it makes everyone realize how crazy he is) - also, Joffrey and Sansa in the TV series continuity are simply older than their book counterparts (Sansa is two years older, Joffrey is four years older). Thus the 14 year old Joffrey in the novels (corresponding to this point in the story) doesn't seem to really know what sex is, while the 18 year old Joffrey in Season 3 would probably be intellectually aware of what sex is (though he isn't physically interested in it), so it is not unfitting that TV-Joffrey would make a sexualized threat if he thought it would frighten Sansa for his sadistic amusement. **After Littlefinger finds out that his prostitute Ros has been spying on him for Varys, he gives her over to Joffrey her murders her simply as a thrill-kill, having her tied up and then shooting her multiple times with his crossbow. Ros is an invented character for the TV series and even the situation doesn't have a direct counterpart in the novels - though it isn't explicitly "sexual" in nature, and Joffrey indeed frequently kills subordinates in the novels just for the fun of it (at one point, when refugees from the war come begging for bread at the castle gates, Joffrey stands atop the battlements and shoots several dead with his crossbow in full view of the rest of the crowd, who flee). *In Season 2's "The Old Gods and the New", the Riot of King's Landing breaks out when starving mobs rush the royal party as they return to the Red Keep from the docks. Joffrey, Cersei, and Tyrion are rushed back inside a gate, but in the confusion Sansa Stark gets lost in the crowd. Sansa gets chased down by several rioters into a nearby building where they knock her down and are about to rape her, but then Sandor "The Hound" Clegane arrives to save her, killing several of her attackers and making the rest flee. He then hoists her over his shoulder and returns her to the safety of the castle. This is loosely based on how the riot occurred in the novels: Sansa was indeed lost in the crowd, but then saved and returned to the castle by the Hound, but because the chapter is narrated from Tyrion's POV what exactly happened to her isn't revealed. Sansa only mentions that Sandor cut off the arm of a man who was reaching for her, but is too stunned to say anything else. Arguably it was implied that the mob tried to kill or rape her, but the TV version isn't limited to just Tyrion's POV so it can show Sansa's perspective. Nor is Sansa's near-rape presented without long-term emotional consequence: in the next episode she is shown to still be having nightmares about the attack. **Many women actually were raped during the riot in the book version, so showing rioters attempting to rape Sansa too may have just been due to economy of characters (and it was loosely implied that this nearly happened to Sansa in the book version). The worst example was probably Lollys Stokeworth, who was taken by the mob and gang-raped "half a hundred times" behind a tanner's shop. The sweet but simple-minded Lollys was heavily traumatized, and worse, she became pregnant from the rape. Later she gave birth to a son that she and Bronn named "Tyrion" after Bronn's benefactor, and the surname "Tanner" due to where he was conceived (instead of "Waters" as is more common for bastards in the Crownlands). It isn't directly stated why Lollys didn't have an abortion, as it is fairly easy for noblewomen to obtain from their maesters an abortive drug called "moon tea" (maybe Lollys and/or her mother just chose not to). Lollys Stokeworth was only introduced into the TV series in Season 5, meaning that she wasn't raped in the riot that occurred in Season 2, and never got pregnant either. *The Season 4 Histories & Lore animated featurette on The Kingsguard narrated by Jaime Lannister has him recount a background event taken directly from the novels: when he was first named to the Kingsguard, at only 17 years old, he was in awe to join the order alongside such living legends as Barristan Selmy, Arthur Dayne, and Gerold Hightower. However, he quickly learned that King Aerys II Targaryen had been going progressively insane for years (despite the court's best efforts to hide it), and now he was openly a raving lunatic having men burned alive in the throneroom for his own amusement. After burning men alive, he was often so aroused that he would force himself upon his sister-wife Queen Rhaella Targaryen, savagely clawing and biting her as he did so. Jaime recounts how horrified he was to be standing guard outside the royal bedchambers and hearing the queen's screams as the Mad King raped her (Jaime outright calls it "raping" her). It is heavily implied that Daenerys Targaryen was conceived during one of these rapes that Jaime overheard. The frightened young Jaime asked the other Kingsguard if they should intervene, but was bluntly told that they swore to guard the king and queen, but not to guard the queen from the king. These supposedly "honorable" knights stood by and did nothing as Rhaella was raped time after time, leaving Jaime's beliefs deeply rattled that things like "honor" or "justice" really exist in the world. By the end, when Aerys ordered his pryomancers to burn King's Landing to the ground, and its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants with it, rather than let it fall to the rebels, Jaime finally snapped and killed the Mad King at the foot of the Iron Throne itself - he was the only Kingsguard who ultimately stood up against the Mad King for his crimes, and for this men nonetheless damn him as "Kingslayer". In the novels, it is heavily implied that Jaime's past experiences being horrified while the Mad King raped his own wife as he stood guard outside the room have, more than many other knights, left him deeply disgusted by rape in general. When he relieves Gregor Clegane's garrison at Harrenhal (after Tywin's death - this was cut from the TV series), and discovers that one of the Mountain's men had raped a washerwoman named Pia, he promptly has Ser Ilyn Payne behead him. This probably also influenced why he saved Brienne from being raped when he didn't need to. *Late in Season 2, Brienne of Tarth leads the captive Jaime Lannister through the war-torn Riverlands, heading to King's Landing to exchange him for Sansa Stark. On the way they see the corpses of three dead tavern girls hanged from a tree, with a sign displayed declaring "They lay with lions" - they were tavern girls who had sex with Lannister soldiers, though they might not have had much choice in the matter when the Lannister army came through in strength. Nonetheless, Stark soldiers hanged the girls when they moved into the region. Brienne and Jaime then run into the three Stark soldiers who hung the girls, who boast about killing them and imply they raped one of them. At the end of this they realize who Jaime is, and the frustrated Brienne kills all three of them so they won't recapture Jaime (whom Catelyn freed for the prisoner exchange against Robb's orders). This essentially happened at the beginning of the third novel, when Jaime observes the girls hanged from a tree for "laying with lions" - though in the novels they don't encounter the Stark soldiers who did it, and thus Brienne doesn't get to kill them for it as she did in the TV version. *In Season 3, Locke and his Bolton soldiers try to rape the captive Brienne of Tarth, and she struggles to fight them off, until fellow captive Jaime Lannister grows disgusted and convinces Locke that as a noblewoman, Brienne's father will pay a much larger ransom if she is unharmed, so he orders his men to stop (then cuts off Jaime's hand, partially out of annoyance at having their fun taken away). This is essentially what happens in the novels, though "Locke" and his men are a condensation of a larger group of characters: Tywin hired the most infamous group of sellswords in the Free Cities, the "Brave Companions", to fight in the Riverlands, to terrorize the local population by raping and pillaging entire towns, and leaving heaps of severed hands and feet in their wake. It is their cruel leader Vargo Hoat who captures Jaime and Brienne and cuts off Jaime's hand. The TV series simply condensed this to make Vargo into "Locke", leader of a particularly vicious group of Bolton soldiers. *In the Season 4 premiere, Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane ride through the devastated landscape of the burned out Riverlands, with destroyed farmhouses and corpses littering the landscape, until they arrive at a still-intact inn. There they find the Lannister soldiers responsible, led by Polliver (who earlier had callously killed Arya's travelling companion Lommy, a small boy with a wounded leg, simply because he didn't want to carry him). In the main room of the inn the drunk Lannister soldiers are accosting and feeling up the terrified (though fully clothed) innkeeper's daughter, as her father begs them to leave her alone but to no avail. Arya and Sandor then get into a confrontation with Polliver, and end up killing all of the Lannister soldiers. This doesn't specifically happen in the novels, but is essentially a condensation of the subplots in the Riverlands showing how badly the front lines of the war have ravaged the Riverlands. Arya had many chapters while she was a prisoner at Harrenhal providing a viewpoint on the suffering of the commoners in the region, but they were heavily condensed in Season 2. Gregor Clegane and his men are indeed mentioned to frequently use rape as a terror tactic, and more generally to be pillaging the countryside. After Robb Stark is killed and his army destroyed, many Lannister soldiers start pillaging the countryside with impunity - and bandits such as the former members of the Brave Companions sellsword company maraud around almost unchecked by the Lannisters or Freys, raping, burning, and looting, even destroying the major town Saltpans. Led by the bandit Rorge, the Brave Companions' destruction of Saltpans (a town inhabited by hundreds to thousands of people) was complete, every building burned, and every female raped regardless of age, even a 12 year old girl who served the Faith of the Seven. Given that all of this did occur in the background in the novels but it was cut for time, the TV version condensed this by having one scene showing Polliver and his men on the verge of raping an innkeeper's daughter, and mentioning that they have been frequently raping and pillaging during the war. *Rape by enemy soldiers frequently happens during many wars in Westeros. The Lannister soldiers, particularly those led by Gregor Clegane, frequently use it as a terror-tactic against the villagers in the Riverlands whose towns are loyal to the Tullys and Starks. Even some of the Stark soldiers are loosely implied to be using rape as a reprisal method against women who aided the Lannisters when they moved into a region (i.e. the women that Brienne and Jaime saw hanged with a sign saying "they lay with lions"). The honorable Starks such as Eddard or his son Robb try to restrain their soldiers from committing rape, but they can't be everywhere at once. During the timeframe of the novels, the military commander who most stringently punishes rape by his subordinates is Stannis Baratheon, due to his strong belief in duty, law, and discipline. After the Battle of Castle Black thousands of wildling prisoners are taken, many of whom were spearwives (women warriors). When Stannis learns that two of his knights were caught raping wildling women they took prisoner, he has them both publicly hanged (a punishment for criminals, more degrading and painful than a beheading, the normal punishment for disobeying orders), as a warning to the rest of his men that he will maintain discipline in his army. No further wildling prisoners are raped afterwards. Chronologically this would have taken place at the beginning of Season 5 (the battle occurred in the Season 4 finale), but apparently - along with much of Stannis's storyline in the North - it was cut for time. *In Season 4, the story of the rape and murder of Elia Martell by Gregor Clegane during the Sack of King's Landing is very prominently introduced. Previously in Season 3, Jorah Mormont mentioned that he saw King's Landing right after the sack, which occurred at the end of Robert's Rebellion nearly 20 years before: the Lannister army led by Tywin had turned on the Targaryens after being let through the city gates as allies, and Jorah says that more women were raped than could even be counted. When Lannister soldiers breached the Red Keep itself, Gregor killed both of Elia's children, the toddler Rhaenys and infant Aegon, because they were the children of the recently killed Crown Prince Rhaegar Targaryen (in the novels, Gregor only killed the baby Aegon, Amory Lorch killed Rhaenys). Still covered in the blood and gore from her children, the massive Gregor proceeded to brutally rape Elia, and afterwards killed her (it is rumored that he cut her completely in half with a blow from his greatsword). This is essentially also what happened in the novels: Gregor raped Elia Martell, but years before, and what happened is recounted by several characters but not actually "shown" in flashback. House Martell was so utterly horrified by the crime of Elia's death that while they surrendered at the end of the war, they have passionately hated the Lannisters ever since, and barely tolerated Robert Baratheon's rule because the Lannisters were his major financial backers (after switching to the rebel side at the last minute at the end of the war, only when it became obvious the rebels would win). **In the novels, it is more clearly explained that even Robert Baratheon knew that Elia's two children had to die because they were Rhaegar's heirs, but the murder of Elia (not even considering her rape) was considered pointless, because as Rhaegar's wife she didn't have any claim to the throne. That Gregor not only killed Elia but raped her first was considered a heinous crime by all, as were the brutal deaths of her children (hacked to pieces when they could have just been gently smothered). After the Red Wedding, when Tyrion points out that Catelyn Stark didn't need to die, Tywin says that he ordered the Freys not to but she got killed in the confusion of the ambush anyway. When Tyrion points out that the same thing happened when Elia Martell wasn't supposed to die but Tywin's vassal Gregor not only killed her but raped her first, Tywin becomes uncharacteristically defensive, and explains that he never told Gregor to do that. His focus was mostly on the sack of the city, and had he known Gregor would do something so brutal he would have given explicit orders to spare her, but he didn't know what kind of monster Gregor truly was yet, so he didn't. By omission it was Tywin's indirect fault for not controlling Gregor, and in fact he had not ordered her rape and murder at all. However, he was so embarrassed to be associated with the event at all that he took no action to punish Gregor afterwards, nor did he explain this to the Martells - in his mind, punishing his subordinate and admitting what happened would have been an indirect admission of guilt. Of course, this tactic completely backfired on Tywin: by offering the Martells no answer and seemingly ignoring their demands for justice, they concluded that Tywin must have directly ordered Gregor to rape and kill Elia, and hated him even more for it than if he had simply told them the truth. The TV series condensed some scenes around and didn't include the dialogue between Tywin and Tyrion, but did later invent a scene between Tywin and Oberyn Martell in Season 4. When Oberyn directly asks if Tywin was responsible for what Gregor did, he firmly says that soldiers often commit crimes during wartime without their commander's knowledge. This shows Tywin hypocritically attempting to placate Oberyn by passing the full blame to Gregor, given that back in Season 1, when Tyrion said that he was having difficulty controlling the rowdy hill tribesmen they had hired as sellswords, Tywin angrily chastises him that when soldiers lack discipline, the fault lies with their commander (in this case, Tyrion). For that matter, Tywin's army as a whole has committed mass rape in two separate wars (during the Sack of King's Landing after Robert's Rebellion, and as a widespread calculated terror tactic in the Riverlands during the current War of the Five Kings) but he doesn't feel personally responsible for restraining or punishing his soldiers. The Jaime/Cersei sex scene in "Breaker of Chains" Craster's wives Tysha *In Season 1, Tyrion recounted how he was married once as a teenager, to a girl named Tysha. He was out riding with Jaime one day outside of Casterly Rock when a commoner girl with half-torn off clothes ran across the road begging for help, as she was chased by two would-be rapers. Jaime went chasing after the rapers while Tyrion took the grateful and frightened Tysha to the nearest inn to recover. After giving her a hot meal they both got very drunk, and before Tyrion knew it he was in bed with her, the first girl who ever had sex with him and didn't seem to care about his extreme ugliness as a dwarf. Tyrion fell so madly in love that he bribed a drunken septon to marry the two of them in secret. Two weeks later the septon sobered up and told his father Tywin, who made Jaime tell him the truth: Tysha was really a whore, and the whole incident with the rapers was staged, they were just men he paid off too - Jaime wanted to do something nice for Tyrion and thought it was time he had a woman, and wanted him to think it was real so it wouldn't hurt his feelings, but he didn't expect Tyrion to marry the girl, who was really just after his money. As punishment, Tywin then forced Tyrion to watch as he gave Tysha over to his castle guards, who each proceeded to have sex with her in front of him, each giving her a silver coin as payment until there were so many they fell out of her hand onto the floor. Tyrion never saw her again. **Tyrion's backstory with Tysha was drastically changed from the novels: at the climax of the third novel, as Jaime is freeing Tyrion from his prison cell in the Red Keep, he is overcome by guilt, and confesses what really happened: Tysha was not actually a whore, nothing about the incident was staged, it was all real. Tysha really was just a commoner's daughter who was attacked by rapers, whom they really saved, and who genuinely fell in love with Tyrion. When their father found out he was utterly furious, so he forced Jaime to tell Tyrion that it was all an act. Jaime went along with this out of fear of their father, and because given that Tyrion would never see the girl again, he thought it might be for the better if Tyrion didn't think she ever really loved him so his heart wouldn't remain broken - Jaime had no idea what Tywin intended to do next. Tywin also threatened Tysha in private to make her give a false confession to Tyrion, and threatened he'd kill her if she resisted when he gave her to his guards. Tysha was not merely a whore that Tywin had abused in front of his son: Tywin's guards were actually raping Tyrin's lawful wife. Tyrion is utterly stunned: this was a complete betrayal by his father, compounded by the fact that he kept the truth from Tyrion for the past 15 years - during all of their interactions during that time, at Casterly Rock or on the Small Council, Tywin always knew this. Not only had Tywin so violated and harmed the woman he loved, he had tried to rob Tyrion of even his happy memories of her by convincing him that it was just an act. Everything Tywin did to Tysha, having her gang-raped by his guards, was petty revenge on Tyrion for killing Tywin's beloved wife in childbirth years before. Consumed by rage, Tyrion makes a detour through the secret tunnels into the Tower of the Hand - not necessarily to kill Tywin but to demand to know what he did with Tysha. There he finds Shae naked in his father's bed, while Tywin stepped out to use the privy. Tywin not only robbed him of Tysha but was now having sex with Shae, as one more almost childish slight against Tyrion. In a fit of rage he strangles Shae to death, then confronts his father on the privy with a crossbow. When Tyrion confronts Tywin about Tysha his reaction is completely callous and flippant, though he bluntly admits that he didn't kill Tysha but simply let her go, and doesn't know where she is. Tywin continues to insist that Tysha was functionally a whore because she couldn't possibly love Tyrion and was probably just after his money. Given the weight that 15 years' worth of tricking Tyrion into thinking Tysha was a whore when she really wasn't have caused, Tyrion says that if Tywin utters the word "whore" again he will kill him, then demands once again where Tysha is. Tywin pauses, then to deliberately try to reassert verbal dominance over Tyrion, announces, "Wherever whores go" - at which Tyrion shoots him through the bowels. Tyrion does not shoot him a second time but simply waits a few minutes for him to slowly die in complete agony, as shit pours out of his wound. **The TV series prominently introduced Tyrion's backstory with Tysha in Season 1, then mentioned her again at least once in every subsequent season. When the scene came in which Tyrion kills Tywin during the Season 4 finale, however, without explanation no mention was made of the truth about Tysha at all - despite the fact that it is the primary if not sole reason that Tyrion kills his own father in the novels, serving as the final climax of the storylines that were building across the first three novels. Gilly Ramsay Bolton See also * Reference Category:Crimes